Shimming, transitions, heat, and more....

Well Prince and I had an interesting play time today. Mom and I went out earlier because it was supposed to get really hot later this morning. I had to do a new shimming pattern for Prince. So I did that first. After that was figured out we went up to the riding ring.

The whole time I was watching to see what things we could improve on. Prince bucked a lot when I asked him to canter so instead of letting him circle we did figure 8's. After a while Prince stopped bucking and just cantered. I then asked him to canter on the circle and GUESS WHAT!!! Prince cantered 5 laps and only broke gait once!!!!!

Prince and I did some sideways, we worked on jumping one barrel lying down, then we played with some change of directions. Prince would run off and totally ignore me. So we took it right back down to the walk and worked on it there. We played with transitions and getting both Transitions and Change of directions really soft.

We got some REALLY REALLY REALLY cool transitions. Plus they were just with the carrot stick!! Normally Prince wouldn't listen or respond to the carrot stick. We got walk, trot canter, then back down again. Prince also backed up about 12ft with me just using my carrot stick and wiggling it slowly, he was about 20ft away from me too!!!

Prince was asking LOTS of questions and was so in tune with me!! I would have gotten on and rode but we were both sweating and it was really hot. The good thing was that the saddle didn't slid forward and Prince's whole back was sweating and there were no dry marks. So that was really nice!!!

Just before lunch when my sister came home she had both our Level 1 packages, with our red strings, certificates, and pins. It is nice to see nice clean savvy string again seeing as my blue on is really rather dirty now. My red one will go up on my wall somewhere as I don't need two to carry around ;)

~K